Tale

I can only get so sold.

Decided to put Kingmaker on the backburner until some more patches. Lots of talk about more issues in later acts and I'd hate to get to one and kill my momentum. But I have an itch. So I started up Baldur's Gate: EE again. Why are good Sorcerer portraits so hard to find? It's an issue with Warlocks too. All the male spellcasters are old men or weirdos. Where's my sophisticated magicy prettyboys? Like Loki from the Marvel movies. Found a portrait of him, but I'll give up video games forever before I use a movie star portrait for a game. Only decent one in the default game is Edwin's. Like I need two of him in the party. Edit: Found a doozy. https://vk.com/photo-34109479_341917808 Rerolled until I had 93 beautiful points to spend and then made all of his stats almost high, 17 or 16 in everything but a 12 in strength and 15 in Charisma. Because Sorcerers in Baldur's Gate don't have a casting stat.

Is the entire Banner Saga trilogy particularly good, even if you like unhappy things? I backed the first part, but never really played it.

Lawful Evil, always. Too many of my favorite characters in fantasy stories are the token evil teammate, I have to take up the mantle myself.

Yeah

Looks like the remaining Telltale members working on Minecraft for Netflix were let go as well. https://twitter.com/anameformyself/status/1047930803634630657 Edit: Correction, not all of the skeleton crew were let go. So I can't even say if it's Minecraft or not. https://twitter.com/anameformyself/status/1047975335235481600

I finished Telltale's Batman season 2. And the final episode was very whelming. It felt like half the size as any other episode in either title. And Joker's ultimate turn ended up being just not as interesting as I hoped it would be. Maybe if the game had spent more time with that version of him it would have been better.

Not good, evil. I got an option to threaten to kill everyone or bluff my way in. I chose to bluff and the second I walked in, one guy screamed bloody murder and the whole place turned hostile. I tried savescumming for other paths to sneak in, but they operated the same. The second I cross the fort wall, get spotted, entire place goes hostile. Nope. Never saw anything even slightly like this. Nobody talked to me other than the gate guard. Who only opened the door. I scouted the entire surrounding area beforehand. Just didn't kill all of the Bandit Brawler/Alchemist groups. I avoided them. So much for brute forcing! Only 1 of these 3 I could get and it required savescumming. Only party member with Nature is Amiri. She failed half the time I tried to make the check. And the Owlbear didn't actually bother doing much to help. He stayed in his cage, I only finally got some help because enemies wandered too close to him. Not because the Owlbear actually went out and tried to help. The only way I beat this fight is because I savescummed a nature check that got an NPC to fight for me. Last time a DM was throwing boss fights at my group that had to be won by NPC, I was rather nonplussed. But at least that NPC was actually there to help and wasn't basically an environmental trap I only got if a single character won the roll. So did I try to brute force? No, I tried to talk through it. And my party got killed. Then I tried sneaking. Killed. I tried cutting the alarm, not an option. I tried setting a trap, except the Stag Lord ignores initiative and in the middle of someone else's turn he shows up, calls in like 5 other guys, buffs himself, and teleports. So I had to resort to MMO pulling. And got lucky when the Stag Lord wandered too close to the Owlbear while out of sight.

And it turns out the boss fights are complete nonse. There goes my enjoyment of the game. Had to cheese the stag lord fight. There was one guy in it who did 1d10+17. And enough attack bonus to hit my Half-Plate + 1, tower shield specialist on a 10. Did I say 1 guy? Make that two. Two other similarly strong guys (the only one of which I checked could hit the tank at an 11 and the last is titular Stag Lord). Then about 3 or 4 regular enemies. Make sure you don't aggro any of the other bandits in the camp, if you pull in one group, you could bring 9 bandits on your head. They can mow you down themselves. I did beat the fight. Using MMO tactics of pulling individual guys and testing their group aggro ranges. And also savescumming to get an Owlbear to tank for me, which it did with no problem. On Normal, this battle did not leave me with the satisfaction of a battle hard won. A bunch of the groups around the boss battle area (which I ended up leaving alive) have enemies in it who are just as tough as those boss guys. I savescummed several times because they mowed my Valerie down before I could kill them. I was making camps in the middle of the enemy camp while a bunch of enemies still lived in it. Just to get the healing I needed to get back in the fight. It felt like I was a good 2 levels or more short of being supposed to fight that. But I'd done every single quest available. I've seen talk about how it's justified that they're giving +17! bonuses to the enemies because we're a 6 member party instead of a 4 and players are smarter than the computer. But they're also doubling and tripling the numbers of enemies.

All disabling auto-updates does is make it so it waits to update when you launch the game. Steam does not like people playing without updates.

You you guys talking chapter 4? I've heard more than a few complaints about gamestoppers there, though haven't read the specifics.

Onto Batman season 2 Episode 3. Only this far in and I can tell how they would have turned this into a trilogy. And I can feel sad it will never be. Batman/Catwoman stories are among my favorite in comics. It's probably why The Long Holloween is one of my top 5 comic stories of all time. And I'm no Batman fan. Dark Knight Returns is garbage, Killing Joke is just okay. But when Batman and Catwoman team up, I'm there. Like Heart of Hush has this absolutely beautiful ending until the final page where it gets thrown away between page turns and I become glad DC tossed that entire continuity for screwing them up like that.

They're putting out hotfixes rapidly, but each seems to cause a spectacular bug of their own. On today's menu, invisible spell selection at level up! When leveling and getting to choose spells, the panel appears blank. They're there, just invisible. How spooky.

Not a fan of Knight, actually. Too much car/tank. Like the only boss battle that doesn't involve the tank is the crappy riddler fight. Anyway, I had to stop halfway into episode 2 of Batman season 2 to say how much I love their version of Harley. She's intimidating. She doesn't act ditzy and random, she's a thug and a kingpin that plays it off as being a joke. And then she just... changes. Starts claiming that she's against violence, it's the other guys who are trouble, and she sells it. I know she's being manipulative, but I want to believe her. And their version of Joker is just kind of fun. He's still like his season 1 self, seeming more like he's just playful and misled. And I can't justify not treating him like a friend who simply needs a nudge in the right direction. But he's the Joker, so you just have to wait for it all to blow up. Is he playing you or is something coming that makes him?

Telltale really liked going all out in first episodes. Just finished episode 1 of Batman season 2. Since so much had happened, I found myself wondering how far I was in to episode 2. Nope, only 3/4th the way into Episode 1.

That's the one. I did the rival parts first, so when I came to Technic league, I was level 3, maybe 4. Split up my four meleers to each individually occupy an enemy fighter. Amiri's doing okay since I'm doing what I can to improve her AC.

The torches were useless. They only do 1 point of damage a swing. The flasks aren't really better. If they get in melee combat with any of your party and you don't have anyone with precise shot, you'll be missing with the flasks and, again, only doing a single point of damage a toss. I killed one of them and nearly killed the other with a single cast of burning hands. If you can get your hands on it. Still, since I've decided to focus my Sorc on damage dealing now I'm enjoying it a bit more. There's another encounter I see lots of people complaining about being forced to concede or lose.. I just came in, tossed out magic missiles, and watched the bad guy run with his tail between his legs. The guy was trying to cast Summon Monster II. Never got it off.

Playing Telltale's Batman, just finished Episode I. I really like it. I was hoping to play my Bruce as irresponsible playboy Bruce instead of social crusader Bruce, but you can't have everything. I guess I finally get what people said when they said the engine is **** and dated. Faces just look funny half the time. Also I finished 428 Shibuya Scramble. Pretty good.

Superman isn't Tim Daly? Whole thing is a fraud, I tells ya'!

I'm getting pretty concerned about that. With them inflating encounters, I'm kind of concerned I'll be fighting a final boss that requires +4 weapons to-hit with a party where half of them only have +3. (or worse, one of the companions uses a bleeding scythe, what are the chances I'll find an upgrade for that?) And I'll need to be intimately familiar with what are the best buffs on the cleric and have my Sorcerer focus on all the exact dispelling spells to overcome protections. Always a problem I ran into with the final bosses in Baldur's Gate games. I think the only time I didn't have to cheese or cheat was my second playthrough of Shadows of Amn.

Okay, so started up a new game and am doing quite a bit better. Helps that my build is better, I actually bothered to put points in Dex this time around so my crossbow isn't garbage. I swapped out Abyssal for Infernal Bloodline because I didn't even notice Infernal was a thing before, and now I've stopped pretending I'm playing an enchanting summoner, so I just blast fools when fools need blasting. Still haven't gone after that swarm. I'm only halfway through level 2, after all. But I am on course to round out my party.

I'm probably going to restart. I've heard about several quests I never got. And my guy is kind of poorly optimized. The game seems to assume a higher level of optimization for normal than I went in with (like the only reliable method I've heard for killing those swarms is burning hands, which I don't have, the flasks are a joke and people are going broke affording enough). Which is kind of a problem since the companions aren't that greatly optimized either.

let them swarm someone who is not throwing them I did. Maybe the penalty is listed as throwing into combat? Anyway, my guy throwing is in the back quite a bit away. I assume it's a penalty to make sure I'm not hitting my own team member. Like penalties in older D&D games for trying to shoot bows at guys your tanks were engaged with.